Welcome to the chaos we call our life & family!

My DH often says this is the chaos we like to call our family, or something to that effect. To answer the basic questions we here often: Yes! With 7 children we are busy! Yes! It often gets hectic, chaotic, crazy, & overwhelming, we love it anyway! No! We do not wish we had a smaller family we can't imagine our lives with less children, we love them all! Yes! It's tricky co-ordinating everyones schedules thank goodness for the FLYlady calendar (if you haven't heard of FLYlady I really recommend looking up her site!). Yes! We do cook a LOT of food, and we eat all or most of it in one sitting! No! You probably do not want to see our grocery bill, or how much we spend on clothes, footwear, sports, etc. each year! ;-) UPDATE: We now have 5 of the original 7 that are 18 & under so we have moved up to college, 2 high schoolers, & just 1 elementary school student at home. We have added a wonderful daughter-in-law and beautiful granddaughter with our oldest. Our 2nd oldest is currently serving an LDS Mission in the Philippines & loving it!

Chaos, maybe, boring, NEVER! There is almost always something going on in our home, never a dull moment from the adult perspective anyway... you know kids, if it gets "too quiet" they are sure it's a sign of being bored! LOL

In 2008 we moved into a new "project home" I have posted some of the fun & craziness that has happened while replacing flooring, adding a furnace, roof, pantry, texture to the walls redoing a kitchen and still more to come, feel free to join us for the ride as we continue to upgrade our home! It has been interesting to say the very least!

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Well we are 11 days into February & I thought I should take a few minutes & write in my blog today. The past 2-3 weeks have been busy to say the least, ontop of the usual hussle & bussle that is our normal life with 2 adults, 7 children ages 2-17, 1 indoor cat, & 1 outdoor dog we have had all kinds of extra excitement. My grandmother on one side went into the hospital for a few days with a mini stroke, she is back home, has recovered her speech & seems to be doing well. While all of this was starting our youngest came down with a high fever on a Friday morning, no other signs of anything else until Monday afternoon, of course after the doctor office phones were turned off, poor thing broke out in fever blisters/canker sores all over her poor little mouth, no wonder she said her mouth hurt! Of course that morning her daddy had left to meetings in Albuqurque, NM & would not be back until late Wednesday evening. On Monday evening my other grandma died, she was 95 and had suffered from Alzheimers for the last several years, grandpa died 20 years earlier so I'm sure he was ready to have her with him now. In the meantime the 2yr old was in to the doctor on Tuesday morning & again on Thursday morning, by Friday she had finally stopped running high fevers & started to feel less pain.

Friday evening my 2 brothers arrived from CA & NV as did many aunts, uncles, & cousins. Saturday we had the funeral here in town & afterwards had an opprotunity to visit with several family members, many of us had not seen each other since grandpa's funeral 20 years earlier. I have thankfully become familiar somewhat with Facebook & found a few other members are on there as well so we have now started a family site to keep in touch & hopefully plan a reunion in the near future. Unfortunately I was without my camera as it had been sent in last month to be fixed, the check just came for a replacement so I will hopefully get photos from those who had their cameras there & were shooting away.

After the weekend was over I have started to recover the house, my routines, etc. Helps to have a small one that does not need to be held every moment of the day because she is in so much pain. Unfortunately now her dad has caught the 5 day flu bug that is going around, they thought he may have pneumonia when he went to the doctor yesterday (he's gone twice now that I remember for being sick since we were married 3&1/2 years ago). Thankfully he did not have pneumonia, just a bad flu bug & an infection so he is home resting (he has not been to work since Monday except for about an hour that he had to go for). Since he has been home I have tried to not go into our room & disturb him which has made me realize how much I generally go in there during the day for various items. You never realize how much you do something until you try to not do it for a day, week, etc. I have thankfully been able to stick to my routines which I have been sending out to many people lately thanks to making a comment on the FLYlady Facebook group, it's fun to see how much you are able to help others with something that you have created mainly to help yourself & your family. It is so nice to help others with something you have created/adapted for your own life.

Now if I can motivate myself to get the family room back into a decent order, it is the one room I am having trouble with, probably bcause it is the one area we have left with very litte furniture & lots of boxes. At least my desk is getting back to normal. I pulled out lots of albums to retrive old photos that needed to be scanned & shared with family members via the Facebook group we created this week. I'm so glad that technology can helps us share these things so easily now.

Well back to the laundry, unloading of a dishwasher, & various straightening up of desk & other areas. Perhaps after noon today I can get in some scrapbooking since I was able to go pick up a piece I needed to make my paper cutter work better.

Jordan & Stacia

About Me

About me... well some say I could write a book, I used to say I’ll design a website instead, & I did. Now I have a blog, my friend said I needed to have one so she could keep up with me that afternoon I decided to do just that, I had nothing else to do with 7 kids! LOL
I am wife to Jordan, my best friend, mother to 3 boys; ages 22, 19, & 16, 4 girls; ages 16(twin), 15, 13, & 6, 2 hyper dogs, every kid that walks in our home. I love to cook (dinner is huge at our house most nights!), love to bake (the kids like that; brownies, cookies, cake you name it!), excel at organizing (again very important with a large family), love people (my merchandising work allows me to work with people & the flexibility that I need for my family), enjoy being a homemaker (with a 6 bedroom house that needs a few hundred things done to update it, lots of TLC), enjoy scrapbooking (great times with my friends & remember all the cute things my kids did on days that they aren’t being so cute & a great creative outlet!), and a major SHE (which makes me really good at lots of things & a bit overwhelmed some days, thank goodness for FLYlady!), and a bit of a computer & information nut!